I have a recurring dream. In my dream I am in a small, square room with stark, undecorated, white walls. In the background there is the low hum of machinery and the steady beeping of a heart monitor. I am lying in a bed with crisp white sheets and a plastic pillow, and rails on both sides. Very soon after observing my surroundings, I realize that I am in the hospital. The pastel-flowered curtain that hangs from the ceiling is drawn back out of my immediate sight. The heavy wooden door with stainless steel handles is just barely ajar.

As I continue to look around, I feel a sharp, radiating pain in my stomach. I am pregnant and in the last stages of labor. The radiating pain is a contraction, and they continue to wash over me every two to three minutes. With each one, I gasp and moan softly at the intensity of the pain. Suddenly, the room is filled with people. There are three nurses, one on each side of me, and one at my feet. They are middle-aged women in light green scrubs. All are efficient, calm, and comforting as they prepare for the arrival of the baby.

The doctor arrives less than a minute after the nurses. They have just finished setting up the tables and trays of cold, sterile, stainless steel instruments all around my bed. I have been thoroughly swabbed from my waist to my knees with cotton balls soaked in bright orange Betadine, and then covered with plastic sheets, like the ones put around your neck at the dentist’s office. Dr. Fitzpatrick’s I.D. tag swings like a pendulum from the front, left pocket of his bright blue scrubs as he shakes my hand and introduces himself. He is only a few years from retirement, and his age and experience are apparent in the slow, methodical way that he moves around the room.

The only person in the room who remains a mystery is the man standing next to my right shoulder. He is holding my hand gently in an effort not to disrupt the I.V. dripping cool fluids into the vein in the back of my hand. He is tall and strong, but he is faceless. I know that he is my husband, but I don’t know who he is. His blue jeans and gray polo shirt are wrinkled and worn as a result of his bedside vigil. His strength comforts me through his warm and caring hand.

Only moments after the doctor arrives, the baby’s head appears. The woman hands the doctor a suction device that looks like a plunger. He uses it to pull the baby from its warm, comfortable shelter into the cold, bustling room. As the baby is laid in my arms against my chest, my heart breaks, and I wake up.

Every time that I have this dream, I awake crying. The tears stream down my face slowly and silently, until I can bear it no more. I pull my soft, warm, knit blanket around me and I crush my lacy blue pillow in my arms. I bury my face into the soft pink roses in the pattern on the pillow and break down into huge, drawn-out sobs. Sometimes I cry until I can cry no more, and then I whimper to myself until I fall asleep again. However, every once in a while, the tears are tears of joy. I wake up overwhelmed with happiness, and I fall asleep again smiling.

The dream started after I gave birth to a beautiful little girl, and she was adopted at six weeks old. For the first six weeks of her life, she was mine; and then she was gone. Although I remain in close contact with her new family, and visit regularly, things will never be the same as they were in the beginning.

I made the decision to plan an adoption for my child very shortly after I discovered that I was pregnant. It was a gray and rainy day in the middle of May. My mom and dad were gone with one of my little sisters to Waco for a golf tournament. I woke up and got in the shower to get ready for school. I had just lathered up my hair with Herbal Essence shampoo, when nausea overcame me. I clambered out of the shower with soapy hair, just in time to lean over the toilet and vomit the meager contents of my nearly empty stomach into the shiny white bowl. As soon as the bout of dry heaves ended, I felt strong enough to climb back into the shower and finish rinsing off. When this happened again the next morning, my first suspicions were solidified into terror.

After school that day I got into my maroon and white ’89 Dodge Diplomat and I went by Albertson’s, my neighborhood grocery store. I spent half an hour walking to and from the aisle where the pregnancy tests were. I stood in front of the shelves of boxes, reading each one. My shame mounted with each person who walked past me. Finally, I grabbed one and headed for the front of the store. I searched the cashiers for a woman who would be too busy to notice that I was so young and scared.

I left the store and went to the Q, a nearby gym where I was a member. I shoved the pregnancy test into my maroon duffel bag that says Great Hills Cheerleaders on it, burying the test under my swimsuit and towel. As I walked into the gym I felt as though everyone that I passed had x-ray vision and could see into the dark corner of my bag where the test was. I hurried past the front desk, the towel desk, and the tanning beds into the ladies’ locker room. I walked quickly past the lockers and the half-dressed women into the farthest toilet stall. It was in the very corner, and here I felt safer than I had all afternoon. I tried to open the box as quietly as possible, afraid that at any moment a well-intentioned woman would knock on the thin stall door and I would be unable to reply. I had to read through the directions in the package twice before I was able to make any sense of them. The third time through I followed them as carefully as possible. All that was left was THE WAIT. I watched the seconds tick by on my gold and silver Anne Klein watch. Slowly, slowly, the seconds became minutes. When I saw the result of the test, the confirmation of what I had already known caused my mind to go numb. I became a zombie. On the outside, I was acting normal, but on the inside my brain had become empty. I left the gym slowly and drove carefully to my house. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

As the months crept by, the pregnancy became more and more real. Once I started to develop the swollen, round belly that comes with pregnancy, I could no longer forget that I was going to have a baby. Every day I watched my stomach expand, knowing that the larger it got, the sooner the baby would arrive. I had appointments with the doctor and meetings with the adoption agency almost every single week, in order to prepare for the baby’s imminent arrival. Finally, in the middle of the summer, I had to get away for a while. I needed a distraction, and some time to relax before the first semester of my freshman year of college began. So, I went to stay on the lake with my maternal grandparents in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

My niece was having heart surgery, and her sister needed a babysitter for a couple of weeks. I volunteered. For three weeks I took care of a two-and-a-half year old girl. I fed her and dressed her and rocked her and put her to bed every day. As a result I got a small taste of motherhood. It solidified for me the fact that I was not ready to be a mother, and that motherhood was a full-time job, while my dreams were to be a full-time college student. I realized that to be both was impossible, and that I was unable to be the kind of mother I felt like my baby deserved. I felt like a failure, and yet I felt empowered by the fact that I was able to give my baby a wonderful home, although not with me.

Although, I still think of her as mine, I knew from the very beginning that she was going to be someone else’s. The pain and the feelings of loss were only a dull ache until after her birth. Towards the end of October, I wrote this entry in my journal. It speaks almost poetically of the sorrow that I had already begun to feel.

Whenever I have my recurring dream, I almost always wake up crying because I know that the child just handed to me is not mine, but belongs to someone else. The loss breaks my heart into a million pieces all over again. It forces me to relive the feeling of knowing that after nine months of nurturing a child, my job is done; almost before it even began. However, for some reason, every once in a while the ending of the dream is different. Something changes in the expressions of the doctor and nurses, and I know that the child is mine. As it lays on my chest on the thin cotton hospital gown my heart bursts with joy and a feeling of lasting peace washes over me. It is after these dreams that I cry tears of happiness, and sleep contentedly through the rest of the night.

Author’s Afterward…

When I received the assignment to write about a personal experience, I immediately knew that this would be my topic. Because of how important, dramatic, and influential this has been in my life it seemed to fit the assignment, and I knew that I would have enough material to complete it.

The birth and adoption of my daughter is a deeply emotional subject for me, and that made it easier to write about; but it made it harder, too. I struggled for four days to capture all the feelings that I have when I think about the entire situation. The dream that I have as a result of her adoption seemed to sum up so many of my emotions and it depicts the conflicting nature of those emotions as well.

The conflict at the center of the adoption is crucial, and trying to capture that was the hardest part of writing this piece. I feel like I capture the good side of it fairly easily, but the depth of the sadness and heartache is not as apparent. The journal piece seemed like the best way to include the sorrow that comes when you make a decision like that, but it also showed acceptance of that decision, too.

The reason that this is my favorite piece is because it is the piece that is most like me. I do not feel like I have assumed an identity to write this piece, and I do not feel like someone is speaking through me. This piece is me.

Although this was my first article to write, in my first communications course, I believe that it is sound in style and grammar. While I learned many new approaches to writing over the duration of the course, this is still my favorite piece because it is the original me.